Comedians as 'agents of thought'

In the second instalment of a six-part series, Ignatius Low speaks to local comedian Rishi Budhrani about the social role of comedy and whether the limits to political incorrectness would eventually shift in the new Singapore.

The first time I see comedian Rishi Budhrani perform is at a black-tie dinner attended by local and foreign editors and journalists.

He is a few minutes into his 20-minute set when he launches into what he calls his "problem sums" joke. It's a dig at the extreme political correctness of the Education Ministry's school textbooks in multiracial Singapore.

Even though textbook writers have taken pains to ensure equal representation of the three major races (Chinese, Malay and Indian) in every problem sum, he tells us, there is "always a hint of unfairness". People snicker as he proceeds to give an example familiar to anyone who studied in Singapore.

"Ah Seng, Ahmad and Muthu are in a playground playing marbles. Ah Seng has 10 marbles and Ahmad and Muthu have two marbles each. If Ahmad and Muthu give all their marbles to Ah Seng, how many marbles will Ah Seng have?"

Nervous laughter erupts as Mr Budhrani answers the question.

"In Singapore, it doesn't matter how you add, subtract or multiply. At the end of every problem sum, the Chinese guy ends up with the most marbles!"

He goes on to say that his friends tell him that true equal representation demands that every race must have a fair shot at winning.

"So, here is my version of the problem sum," he says. "Muthu, Ah Seng and Ahmad are sitting in a coffee shop. Muthu has 10 bottles of beer," he declares. "Ah Seng can only handle two, and Ahmad is drinking ice Milo."

I look around. The senior journalists in the room are no shrinking violets, but only half of them are laughing at his reference to the old racial stereotype that Indians like to drink. The other half are checking one another's reactions, as if not quite sure to believe what they've heard.

Yet Mr Budhrani goes on, and when he delivers the punchline to "the problem sum that only the Malay guy can win", there is some raucous laughter. But others in the audience are whispering and shaking their heads. It's a reaction that the 31-year-old comic can still recall four months later when I meet him for this interview.

I ask him whether in the new Singapore of the future, people will eventually become okay with performers like him who seem to dance on some of the deepest fault lines of our society.

"It's already happening," says the born-and-bred Singaporean confidently. "I think race in Singapore is not something people are uncomfortable with.

"It's something that people even enjoy laughing at, because we've all grown up aware of one another's differences. So doing the kind of comedy that I do about race is just another way to celebrate one another. I don't see it as anything more than that."

Mr Budhrani quickly points out, however, that there is a big difference between "doing racist jokes" and what he does, which is "mocking the ridiculousness of racial stereotypes". He says he also takes care to take the sting out of a racial joke by balancing it with something that people can feel good about. For example, in the problem sums joke, he earns more laughs by pointing out that although the Chinese guy always has the most marbles, street-might would have led Ahmad and Muthu to bully the weak Ah Seng and take his marbles.

It's a tricky sense of balance which Mr Budhrani has had to pick up quickly in his relatively short four-year career as a stand-up comic.

The son of a couple that run a tailoring business, the Tanjong Katong Secondary old boy first discovered his love for performing when he dropped out of Officer Cadet School during full-time national service and became a clerk with plenty of free time on his hands.

Apart from doing some theatre work and hosting friends' parties, he started dancing in a Bollywood dance troupe, where he met his wife, Ms Sharul Channa, who is now his occasional performing partner.

When he graduated in 2009 from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, he started a company with her called Complete Communicators. Initially, it was a "Bollywood dance instructional thing with corporate training", he says, but now the company conducts humour-based motivational and public speaking workshops.

The following year, he went with Ms Channa and a few friends to the now-defunct Home Club in Boat Quay to check out the open-mic stand-up comedy show there. He eventually ended up sitting in the front row every night for two weeks straight.

"There were comedians just going on and talking (nonsense)," he recalls. "But you could see there were some people who were real writers and real performers and I thought: I want to do this for fun."

In any case, he had been nursing the dream for a while. "I even had this Microsoft Word document in my computer," he recalls. "If I were to one day crack jokes on stage, this is what I would say."

After the second week at the comedy open-mic nights, he kicked back "six or seven drinks" and went onstage. He was given three minutes but did seven.

Some of his jokes - including one about how likening the right woman to the right sort of men's underwear - bombed, but other more graphic jokes seemed to work.

"They let you learn and die on your own, but I got addicted somehow," he says. Since then, Mr Budhrani has never looked back. He won a comedy competition in Hong Kong and has performed in the United States, Britain, Australia and many other venues in Asia.

Not bad for someone coming from a country known far better for its pragmatism and efficiency than having a sense of humour, I say. But Mr Budhrani disagrees.

"I have never thought Singaporeans are uptight. At least, I've never had that feeling about this country in terms of audiences as a performer," he says.

"I do get a sense, however, that with Singaporeans, there is almost this fear that the other person is uptight. You know... I think you are uptight and you think she is uptight, and she thinks that I am uptight - but actually we are all cool about it."

He adds that he encounters this a lot when he hosts events where ministers or civil servants are in attendance. "The event company will be saying: '...this is straight up formal, don't even smile.' And I tell them I don't think that's the right way. A lot of people mistake formal for serious, and I've seen time and time again that you can be relaxed yet formal."

Mr Budhrani notes that younger Singaporeans are probably more open to a wider variety of humour, having been exposed to comedy shows from the West.

"But there is still a process of education that is going on here - that it is okay to clap or to laugh at this," he adds. "It doesn't mean... it's going to suddenly cause a war between Singapore and Malaysia, or racial riots."

In fact, Mr Budhrani goes further to even posit that comedy is cathartic in the new Singapore, and that comedians are the new "agents of thought".

"When the Amy Cheong incident happened, there were comedians who joked about it in comedy clubs," he says, referring to the former NTUC staff member who was fired from her job after posting an offensive remark on Facebook about Malay weddings.

"They did this not to incite hatred or to darken the lines of differences in our society, but as a nod to say yes, I know what we all are thinking. We've read about it... so let's address it. That's part of our job as comedians..."

But once society has addressed an issue, it can learn to be more forgiving. That's the one thing that Mr Budhrani hopes will change about Singapore. "That's how we became the tolerant nation that we were in the first place," he says, emphasising the word "were".

"I don't know, maybe we still are but there is a lot of evidence to suggest otherwise. Today, we are very aware of the disgruntlement among us, very aware of the disdain and anger. It's difficult because anger feeds anger.

"If we can be more forgiving, you will find that there can be a lot more positivity that we can bring in the next 50 years."

This article was first published on February 16, 2015.
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